Poor Land, Poor Hunting

by LOUIS BROMFIELD

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SOIL Conservation Chief Hugh H. Bennett is responsible for the saying that “poor land makes poor people.” He might well have added that “poor land makes poor hunting and fishing,” for one will not find good fishing in eroded country where the streams are filled with silt, nor in sandy country where the lake bottoms contain little vegetation and the water little or no plankton or the minuscule animal life which provides the major part of the diet of many varieties of fish. All kinds of game from the humble cottontail to the noble deer abhor worn-out and abandoned land where the soil has been depleted or the level of agriculture has become so low that the mineral fertility is no longer available to the vegetation.

Science has countless examples of the power of animals to discern and avoid mineral deficiencies and to correct those mineral deficiencies by the most desperate means. The sow who eats her young does so not through any depravity but because she has been kept penned up and improperly fed. She is hungry for protein as well as calcium and phosphorus. A sow set free with a new litter will forage her way across country taking care of them and bringing uP a better, stronger litter than most sows penned and fed according to ordinary dietary formulas. She will find somehow, even in depleted areas, the minerals she needs for herself and her litter.

Cows will develop depraved appetites if fed from land depleted of phosphorus and calcium, and will take to chewing old bones in order to satisfy the deficiency. I have even heard the fantastic tale of cows on the phosphorus-deficient Gulf Plain eating dead fish washed up on the shore in order to satisfy their craving for the deficient phosphorus.

And there is the famous experiment of Professor William Albrecht of the University of Missouri, one of the greatest authorities on soil and nutrition. In this experiment, stacks of hay from five differeut fields, all but one deficient in some important mineral, were set up in a winter feeding lot filled with cattle. The fifth stack was harvested from a well-managed fertile farm on which all the known vital minerals were present in the soil in good balance and available to the plants. For three successive years, regardless of how the stacks were arranged, the cattle consumed them in the exact order of deficiency of the farm soils on which the forage was grown, eating the nutritious stack first and then consuming the next best, and so on down the line to the poorest.

And there is the now famous story of the blind mule at Ohio State Agricultural College who was pensioned off and allowed to graze across the test plots of the college. Again one plot had a wellbalanced, productive soil, with five adjoining plots arranged to demonstrate varying degrees of mineral deficiency. The blind old mule stayed on the fertile plot until he had grazed it down to the ground. Then he moved downward across the plots of declining fertilities in the exact pattern followed in Dr. Albrecht’s experiment with the hay and cattle. Any farmer knows that if he fertilizes a strip or a part of a depleted pasture, the cattle will stay on the fertilized strip until it is eaten bare before going over to the pasture on the deficient, less wellbalanced soil.

The Ohio State Division of Wildlife, which is concerned mainly with fish and wild life propagation and habitat, has long been studying the relation of game and fish to their habitat in the state. In contrast to many of our states, Ohio originally had deep, rich soils. But much of the land in time has been badly depleted, a fact to which the cottontail has shown a rapid and striking reaction.

The cottontail provides a problem with which the game commission struggled for years. He leaves the poor farm for the nearest good farm; he leaves the depleted areas for the easy, rich living of the suburbs where the gardens are fertilized and given abundant compost and other organic material. He has become a pest in city suburbs and in small towns, while hunters over large areas in open wild country complain that they cannot find a single cottontail to shoot. It is probable that 50 per cent or more of Ohio’s rabbit population resides and flourishes today not in the open fields of rural areas and second-growth timber but in the garden areas of suburbs and small towns. For the past two years the Division has engaged the efforts of boy scouts and others in trapping the suburban rabbits and transporting them back into rural areas.

Thus far this method seems to have corrected little, for the rabbit population continues to feed with regularity in city gardens. Either the cottontails migrate rapidly onto the nearest good soil or, on the deficient worn-out areas to which they are transported, they simply die out.

The experiments of Dr. Albrecht have shown beyond dispute the evil effects of mineral deficiencies, and in particular lack of calcium, upon the breeding capacity of rabbits. He found that rabbits fed on forage grown upon calcium-deficient land failed to breed, but that when their diet was changed to forage grown on well-balanced soil with sufficient calcium content, they bred easily and rapidly and raised large and vigorous families. When fertile rabbits raised on good forage grown upon good soil were changed to forage deficient in minerals and calcium, they ceased to breed.

The cottontail apparently abhors the regions of abandoned worn-out farms which have gone back to a wild state, although the rabbit is a wild animal and presumably prefers wild country with plenty of cover. Solitude and good cover seem to make no difference to him if the forage is of poor quality.

In metropolitan and suburban areas and in parks where good soil practices are observed the increase in skunks, opossums, and raccoons has made them pests. Not long ago in Cleveland, a skunk moved into the fruit cellar of a citizen living in the heart of the city. For days the press carried suspense stories of the family’s effort to evict the skunk without lingering and odoriferous results. The animal appeared to like his new habitat and spent most of his day sleeping, refusing to be disturbed. He was finally lured out of the cellar by a tasty meal of sardines and the cellar was sealed against further invasions.

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To a great extent the deer in Ohio, like the raccoons and opossums and cottontails, have taken to suburban living. Ohio, save for three or four half-wild hilly counties, is not deer country like the wild mountainous regions of Pennsylvania, New York State, and adjoining Michigan. It is a big, lightly forested area of farms, orchards, and nursery plantations where deer can create great damage. Not many years ago it would have been difficult to discover a deer in the whole state of Ohio, but recently deer have increased steadily in number to the point where they are not only a nuisance to farmers and fruit growers but in some areas a menace on the heavily traveled roads of this thickly populated state. Four years ago, in order to reduce the deer population, the State Division of Wildlife authorized an open season on bucks, and when this failed to produce satisfactory results, does were included in the open season.

The odd fact is that the heaviest deer population is in northeastern Ohio, an area of good farms, truck gardens, and nurseries, rather than in the half-wild hilly country given back to secondgrowth timber. Apparently deer, like the cottontail, know where the good forage grows and are willing to risk the menace of dogs and irate farmers in order to get really nutritious food. And this despite the fact that deer feed largely off the leaves and twigs of trees which, penetrating by way of their roots below the shallow depth of the wornout and eroded soils, are able to produce forage of a higher mineral balance and quantity. However, even the trees and undergrowth on deficient and unbalanced virgin soils will provide deficient and nutritionally unbalanced forage — a fact to which the noble deer seems as sensitive as the humble cottontail.

Scarcely a day passes without the report of three or four deer being the cause of a highway accident, or of a deer jumping through the window of a filling station or shop in the very outskirts of big cities such as Cleveland, Akron, or Youngstown. Like the cottontail they have ceased, in their quest for good forage and easy living, to avoid thickly populated areas.

A peculiar deer problem arose in Cleveland, where well within the city limits a small herd took to living off the well-fertilized shrubs and grass of one of the largest cemeteries. The destruction they caused to the living trees and plants was bad enough, but after a time they acquired a taste for the floral offerings placed on the graves at funerals. They finally perfected the tactic of watching the funeral from a distance and waiting until the mourners drove away. 1 hen they devoured the Broken Wheels, the Shattered Columns, the Gates Ajar, and the blankets of roses left behind.

Complaints from bereaved relatives and friends forced the Division to take action. At first it attempted to trap the deer, but because they preferred the abundant cemetery diet of roses, carnations, and tuberoses, they merely ignored the alfalfa hay habitually used to lure deer into the traps. Eventually the herd had to be destroyed. For myself, I should have preferred the deer to the floral offerings, but I was overruled by the army of bereaved and outraged relatives.

On our own land at Malabar Farm, as the level of the fertility was raised and the virgin subsoil minerals were made available through fertilizer, organic material, and deep-rooted grasses and legumes, both the fish and game populations increased by leaps and bounds. Adjoining the farm on the hilly side above the valley lies an area of abandoned, worn-out farms slowly being taken over again by the forest. One can walk a whole afternoon over this area and see scarcely a dozen birds, not a rabbit, and no trace even of a field mouse. But once the fence dividing that area from the restored land at Malabar is crossed, one encounters birds by the hundred, plenty of rabbits and squirrels, and every sort of game, including even a small herd of deer which lives with us the year round. The deer hide in the big fenced-in wood lots by day, but in early morning or in the evening they can be seen at the farm ponds, around the salt blocks, and pasturing on the lush alfalfa, ladino, and brome grass on which they live throughout the winter months. No chemist testing soils is a more accurate judge of the soils on the two sides of that line fence than the wild animals themselves.

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ANY traveler by automobile is familiar with the vast amount of game killed along the highways; some states have even erected road signs urging motorists to be careful of the game. But the real reason for the slaughter is not the carelessness of the average driver. It is that the forage along most roads is more palatable and nutritious than that in the farmer’s fields on the other side of the fence. The land along the roadsides has remained uncultivated since the first roads were laid out by a wandering Indian or by Federal survey, and is virgin soil undespoiled by a poor agriculture or by the depletion of organic materials. In the fields on the opposite side of the fence row, the soil has been depleted and the forage is short of minerals and vitamins. The farmer’s livestock is forced to eat this forage, but not the wild animals, which are free to wander and will reject it for the richer food on the virgin soil of the roadside.

Recently there has been a tendency throughout the country to straighten old roads. The forage which grows along the borders of a new road cut through depleted fields is scanty and sickly, even to the casual glance, compared with the vegetation along the virgin borders of the old winding road. Moreover, the fertility of this virgin land bordering old roads is frequently augmented by the dust and the splashed mud coming from the bed of roads surfaced with limestone or with mixed gravel high in mineral content of all sorts.

On the land we rent from the Muskingum Conservancy District there are two large fields separated by a county road which for two generations has been surfaced with limestone or with conglomerate gravel. The prevailing winds blow at right angles to the road across the fields, carrying dust away from the one and across the other. Although both fields had been treated the same by their former owners and had eventually been abandoned, in the field which regularly received the powdered limestone and the mineral dust from the disintegrated gravel the fertility of the soil has always been from 20 to 30 per cent greater. It is also notable that the pheasant population is found nearly always on the side of the road where the mineral dust has been deposited for years.

Once my partner, resenting the dust which sometimes covered the crops on the leeward side of the field, suggested inducing the county commissioners to oil or tar the roads. I promptly vetoed the proposal, observing that we were gel ting per acre, every year, many dollars’ worth of the most valuable minerals, in highly available form, without spending a penny. Sometimes visiting farmers ask whether we do not resent the clouds of dust which on hot days blow across the fields from our graveled farm lanes. The answer is “No.” The tires of the visiting automobile act as a kind of fertilizer factory, pulverizing and spreading across our fields, together with wind action, a mixture of minerals from potash and phosphorus through such valuable trace elements as manganese, cobalt, and a score of others.

Where there are both good cover and well-balanced soil of high available fertility, there you will always find the big populations of wild game, and there you will find plenty of field mice and pheasants, quail, and other birds; there too you will find the owls, the foxes, the catamounts, and other predatory animals. There too you will find the balance in Nature operating as it should, to the benefit of the farmer, the hunter, and the fisherman as well as of the wild life itself.

Ohio has led the way among all the states in emphasizing this fact. The State Division of Wildlife pays for research and game and fish management out of the funds received from sportsmen for licenses, and from the Federal government, which, under the Pittman-Robertson Act, matches funds with the states to establish good game habitat and conservation practices. In Ohio today most of the sportsmen’s money and the Federal appropriations is not spent upon hatcheries and game farms which breed artificially pheasants, raccoons, fish, and other forms of wild life and then distribute them over worn-out areas where neither fish nor game can propagate or even survive; the money is being spent on creating proper habitat and feeding conditions so that fish and wild life may thrive and propagate to maximum capacity. The policy is paying big dividends which increase with each successive year as cover for wild life increases and as reforms in agriculture provide good forage and clear, clean streams.

The old way was to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars annually to hatch and raise pheasants and then to plant them in the fields a couple of days before the season opened, which provided less real sport than the shooting of an ordinary flighty white Leghorn chicken, or to hatch and raise at great cost fish which, when they saw you on the bank, followed you along in schools, in anticipation of a handout of liver or horse meat. The cost of each fish raised under such a program was stupendous. In one state, a survey showed that every artificially raised trout was placed in the stream at the cost of $4.75.

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As expensive hatcheries have been closed one by one in Ohio, the money saved has been spent on cleaning up streams and lakes and on the establishment of dozens of headwater lakes of all sizes, both to provide sport and to create natural spawning areas for fish. About four years ago in certain streams and lakes which had been put into good habitat and propagation conditions, all fishing restrictions were lifted. Any fisherman could fish at any time of the year and take as many fish as he liked, regardless of size. As in the case of the great artificial lakes of the Tennessee Valley Authority, where the habitat conditions are excellent and no restrictions exist, the fishing has steadily improved both as to quantity of take and as to size.

This is easy to understand when one realizes that a single female bass or trout produces up to 200,000 young fry. Crappies, sunfish, and bluegill or bream are even more prolific. In some lakes and ponds the fishing is poor because there are too many fish, and they are all stunted and undersized because there is not enough food for them. A fish does not grow according to age, but according to how much it gets to eat. A five-year-old bass may be seven or eight inches long or a three-year-old bass twenty to twenty-four inches according to the abundance of its diet. Considering the fecundity of any female fish, there should be — and in fact there is— no need to stock artificially a stream, a lake, or a pond where conditions of food and habitat are good.

A few years ago at Pleasant Hill Lake I happened upon a Wildlife Division fish truck dumping young hatchery bass five or six inches long into the clear water of this lake which borders our farm. The driver did not know that I was chairman of the Division, and in the course of our conversation he observed, “This is the damnedest foolishness I ever saw. It cost a small fortune to raise these fish, and a pair of bass will produce for free about fifty times as many fish as I’m dumping today.”I hastened to add that I agreed with him heartily.

Ohio is a thickly populated state, largely agricultural, with great industrial cities scattered evenly over its area — Cleveland, Youngstown, Columbus, Cincinnati, Dayton, Toledo, Akron, to name a few — and dozens of other cities with populations ranging from 50,000 to 100,000 inhabitants. But Ohio has some of the finest fishing in the world — much finer in fact than in many states which spend millions each year advertising their fishing, to attract the tourist and the sportsman. And each year as Ohio’s agriculture and forestry practices improve, as new headwater lakes and farm ponds are constructed and streams are freed from pollution, the fishing grows better.

A good deal of my life has been spent in Europe, in areas more thickly populated than Ohio, where there were natural game and fish in such quantities as I have rarely seen in the United States. Both fish and game existed even up to the suburbs of large cities, and in smaller towns one could have excellent trout fishing in the streams which paralleled the main streets in the very center of town. In these areas in France, in Austria, and in Germany, this abundance existed because the conditions of habitat and the regional agriculture were excellent.

In all of this, good soil and clean water, and the minerals and vitamins that go with them, are of prime importance. Next comes the farmer, who is the second most important factor, for in his hands very largely lies the control of such conditions. Cities and industries may and do pollute streams and lakes, but by far the greatest cause of the depletion of the fish populations, and of poor fishing, is the pollution which comes from siltation and the erosion of soil from badly managed farms in the hands of ignorant or stupid farmers. Game fish will not live in muddy flooding streams, and siltation in the form of mud eventually prevents them even from propagating. First the game fish go, to be replaced by the sluggish carp and catfish; and then, as in some parts of the eroded Deep South, there are no longer even carp and catfish, but only turtles, frogs, and snakes.

The conditions work backward as well, up the streams onto the land itself. The badly managed farm not only loses its topsoil and the availability of its mineral fertility, but the farmer’s income and economic and sociological status go with it. And each year there is less and less wild life as animals desert the wretched forage grown on poor, illmanaged land for the richer stuff, which they recognize by taste and instinct, that grows on good, well-managed, and productive soil. All of these things — good hunting and good fishing, good crops and abundant propagation whether of wild life or domestic animals — come from the same place as the farmers’ prosperity and independence and self-respect: out of the earth.